


a shadow made for the modern world

by goneawayblues



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Canon-typical mentions of sexual assault/violence, F/M, Magical Realism, Mentions of past Alex/Olivia, yells BISEXUALTIY IS VALID
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2019-11-28 06:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18204869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goneawayblues/pseuds/goneawayblues
Summary: The first time Rafael notices Olivia's voice, he thinks he's edged into a daydream.orOlivia has a little something extra that drives Rafael into memories he thought he'd buried. An attempt to wedge magical realism into SVU.Title from "Judas" by Esperanza Spalding





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Rafael notices Olivia's voice, he thinks he's edged into a daydream. A realistic daydream, in which he is on the safer side of a two-way mirror, waiting for the key words to move forward with a subpoena on a particularly obfuscated case. 

(Two women, physically assaulted twice, dumped, then sexually assaulted by a different perp, and no visual on either of their attackers. All in a day's work.)

He's not alone. Rollins stands next to him, her foot tapping absently as she tracks Amaro and Olivia's stances. They have a rather beautiful rhythm, if one could call pressing information out of a potential assaulter anything approaching beautiful. As soon as Olivia retreats, Amaro advances, seamlessly connecting their entrances and exits so the weaselly, pimpled man (he looks more like a boy) at the table has no choice but to shift with them, his gaze bouncing from one assailant to the next.

Rafael is still fairly new to Manhattan SVU, so he's learning how they all fit together - how they really complement, or detract from, one another.

"They've been in there for an hour," Rollins says. "You sure you and Cragen can't just let us bust down Kevin's door already?"

"We need him to express knowledge of a camera - digital files, sim card, disposable, whatever. Otherwise we're fishing," Rafael answers. 

"We know he has a private collection," Rollins says. "Guys like that? They document their own displays. They need evidence to remind them that they can be men." 

Rafael swears that he will not waste his energy on refuting yet another overreaching detective's psychosexual analysis without sufficient evidence, so he merely turns back to the enfolded scene. 

It's Amaro's monologue, and he's playing macho, his forearms bracing against the table. But the little weasel (Rafael really hates the look of this one) has given up following, instead turning to face the wall, all but plugging his ears.

Olivia pulls Amaro back, whispers something to him that Rafael can't make out, and brushes by Amaro to sit next to Kevin. For a moment, she sits in silence as Amaro exits, and waits until the door clicks behind him to put her hands on the table. 

Amaro sidles next to Rafael, knocking his knuckles softly above the window. He’s as restless as Rollins.

"What did she say?" Rollins asks.

"Wanted a moment. I think she's gonna play nice."

Rollins turns back to the scene before them, smirking. They know what happens when Olivia plays nice.

"Do you know what you did?" Olivia asks, and it's so much more patient than Kevin deserves. He doesn't answer. 

"Kevin," she starts again. "You are not a bad guy. I know that. Nick might know that, too, it's just, in these situations? He's used to really, really bad guys. I'm trying to convince him that you're not like them, but I really need your help on this, and right now? You're not making a case for yourself."

"I'm not - I'm not a monster," Kevin finally answers, but he's still turned away. "I'm not the one who hurt them." 

He's nasal, whining as soon as someone presents him the benefit of the doubt. 

"I know, I know," Olivia nods. "But right now, Nick thinks that you did. That you're to blame."

Kevin's shoulders hunch, his face pinches, and Rafael wants to throttle him through the glass. 

"Kevin, look at me." 

Rafael startles. As tinny as Olivia's voice is through the PA, something in her inflection - maybe her emphasis, catches his ear.

Apparently, it's caught Kevin's, too, because he does as requested. 

"You can trust me, Kevin," Olivia says, giving one of those little smiles which is only the slightest upturn of her mouth. "If you didn't hurt them, you have absolutely nothing to hide."

Kevin balks, his jaw working, but no sound coming out. The bastard absolutely has something to disclose, but is fighting against himself to keep it in. Instinct to please, susceptibility to flattery, versus self-preservation. Rafael would snort, but he's also hanging on Olivia's next words. She could clinch it here.

Olivia leans in, inching her hand toward Kevin's on the table, but stopping just shy of contact. Her voice is soft, conciliatory - as if offering an apology rather than a request. If Rafael didn't know better, he'd be outraged.

"Tell me the truth.”

Rafael doesn’t have long enough to ponder why such a deceptively simple command, next to soluble in their business, pings a warning bell. Kevin is already talking in a wheedling rush. 

"I took photos of us, after. But only so I could show that I didn't hurt them. I wouldn't hurt them. You'll tell him that, right?" 

"She got him," Amanda breathes next to Rafael, shaking her head in disbelief. "Sucker."

Kevin is practically falling toward Olivia now, reaching for her hand when she interrupts him. 

"Where are they?"

There's a raised edge to her question, and Kevin sniffs at the redirection. Olivia cuts a hard angle now, her hands flattening against the table. It's her version of white-knuckled - a telltale sign that she's separating interior and exterior to a point that it physically hurts.

"What?"

"The photos that you took. Where are they?" If she presses her hands to the table any harder, they'll imprint, Rafael thinks. 

"Uh..." 

"Your apartment?" She says it like she knows, like she just wants him to say it for the satisfaction of hearing him inextricably dig himself deeper. But in doing so, she's given the game away, and Rafael honestly can't hold it against her. They have what they need.

Kevin's eyes widen as he sits back, scraping the chair against the floor and nearly toppling over. 

"I don't know. I mean, I deleted them, I think." 

"Well, I'll send Nick back in here to help you think harder," she says as she stands, all traces of sensitivity and whatever THAT was broken. Kevin is too stunned to even send a parting expletive her way.

"We're looking for anything digital - hard drive, Cloud, photo sharing software," Olivia says as she emerges. "He claims he doesn't own a smartphone, so we're looking for that, too."

"I'll send it to you," Rafael says, already on his phone to the DA. 

"Good. Nick, see if he knows anything about the rapist - he sounded familiar with him, maybe embarrassed about a friend, a brother. Rollins, let's go," Olivia says, grabbing her coat as Amanda does the same. Even as Olivia is a whirlwind striding past him, she claps Rafael on the shoulder. 

"We’re on our way," she says, steadfast and reassuring, too close to his ear. 

He pretends that he waits for them to leave first out of efficiency. But at least a minute ticks past before he brings himself to reopen the door.

Maybe he's imagining it - too little sleep this week has made him jumpy. But there was something in Olivia's interrogation that tickled a memory at the very back of his brain. He brushes it away. She's good at her job, so it appears. Just because she's one of the more competent cops he's worked with doesn't mean she's playing a different game. Just because he inexplicably thrills when she gets too close to him doesn't mean he's anything other than touch starved. And maybe a little intimidated, still. 

He shakes himself, finishing an e-mail. If he shoos away his more cynical misgivings, there’s nothing truly extraordinary about a careful, dedicated investigator. Also nothing extraordinary (just annoying) about needing to get laid. 

\---------

It takes Rafael longer than he'd like to admit, but of course he realizes there is something extraordinary about Olivia. More than one thing.

Her empathy, for one. Her unrelenting follow-through. Her complete inability to let him take a prescriptivist view of law when a survivor is at the short end of the stick, but he didn't see her getting her J.D., goddammit. She drives him crazy.

But he settles into a state of collaboration, and admiration. And jaw grinding, and sighing, because the work never, never ends. With a partner like Olivia, a sentinel whose intentions have somehow withstood more than a decade in her department, he can almost stomach that impossibility.

Even so, there's one more thing that continues to baffle him, above all else, ever since that case so early in his tenure. He can't stop himself from noticing Olivia's voice, and sometimes, when his guard is down, Olivia's body.

Oh, yes, their chemistry is also something extraordinary, and more often than not Rafael relishes it. If he thought a few well-meaning casual dates with other, attractive, non-work, totally in-limits people, and a few more (admittedly, relieving) one night stands were the solution to his workplace frisson, well. Silly him. But there's more to his observations of Olivia’s particulars than a crush -- at least, Rafael thinks there is. 

_Knows_ there is, when he strips away that walled-up part of him keeping closed the weeping brujas and silent, corner-hugging brujos of the Bronx. The altars, the candles, the tobacco, the innumerable names of god-saints which had somehow combined with a colonizer's new and rigid religion to form a sort of fluid, simultaneously ancient and original _mezcla_ hundreds of years ago. When he senses, more than remembers, the hands laced with workings of santería - hands that held his, and touched his lips, and fisted the hair at the back of his neck, hidden behind thin dressing shades on a sizzling summer day. 

Knows that it’s a link to a chain he broke well before his first days in law school. 

Olivia is not from that world, but something in her voice enmeshes with it. Practically sings with it, if Rafael listens closely enough, and allows himself to entertain vague memories of that current which so few secularized Americans (Rafael included) can acknowledge without upending notions of the basic building blocks of the universe. 

And Olivia’s wielding of her voice is subtle, and varied. Rafael can count on one hand the number of times he's actually heard it in full employ. Most of the time, there's just an edge of something more, something nearly tangible in the way she asks, in the way she questions, coaxes, connects. A guiding sound wave in the darkness. 

But in those rare, rough cases that he's present for a display of downright preternatural power, Rafael feels like he's standing too close to a coal pit, in danger of being roasted over a spit. And he's never even been the direct recipient. Not that he wants to be, and not that he would ever bring it up. You don't bring things like this up -- not even in the family. You whisper them down, skipping whole chunks of instruction generations at a time so that they're no more than an inkling of a story; a curl of smoke from a window to a fire escape before it dissipates into the night. 

Even so, he can’t help but notice. Especially when he, unavoidably, makes a misstep.

Late February, his fourth year with Manhattan. He loses a case in which no one in their right mind would have decided against the survivor. The lack of conviction settles in his gut, brutal and gnawing and retching every poisonous piece of dismissed evidence and closable loophole, and he nearly stumbles out of the courtroom. _Not guilty_ , the foreman repeats in his head, over and over, circling the drain. _Not guilty_. 

Olivia arrives at his office door within twenty minutes, and he wants to turn her platitudes away almost as much as he craves them. But before he can decide one way or another, they young survivor in question barrels her way through the door, accusations spewing. That he would keep her safe, that they would win, that the good guys wore white hats and black robes and the bad guys were put behind _bars_ , not on the bench.

"I'm so sorry, I'm sorry," is all he can offer as she nearly launches herself at him, a fist against his chest, backing him into his desk, her hair wild around her face, making her look as feral as he feels helpless. 

"Stop."

The command is from Olivia, and it sucks the air from the room. They both halt their speech immediately, but their chests are heaving and Rafael feels the unbearable prick of tears waiting to spill.

"Stop, stop, I know," Olivia repeats, her hand on the young woman's shoulder from behind. She steps closer, both hands going to her shoulders, thumbs sweeping and pressing and suddenly the woman is boneless, slumping back against her. Olivia drapes one arm across her chest, wrapping around the woman completely as she can, and the angry heaving of her chest and her shoulders turn to a shaking forth of real tears, falling into the sea.

"I know," Olivia repeats, relentlessly calm, impenetrable, and Rafael feels a swell of gratitude before he realizes Olivia has reached for his hand as well. She squeezes, once, and he swears there’s a spark rushing from her fingertips to his palm before she drops his hand, using it to press the woman’s hair back from her face.

"It's OK. You're safe. We're here. You're safe." The words are generic, simple, but even so, the woman's head lolls back onto Olivia's shoulder, nodding. She's still crying, but there's no violence in her body, subsumed by an encroaching emptiness. Rafael knows this, has to know this, because it's traveling through him, resounding with every word. He sinks back heavily onto the desk, just watching.

At some point, the woman's eyes close, and her breathing steadies.

"We're going to figure this out. You have us," Olivia says, and for a moment, watching the woman nod and take absolute surety in Olivia's words, Rafael believes her.

For at least a week after, he can't help it. His body acknowledges hers as a healer, and every time she's in the room, he needs to be close to her. Whether she notices, she doesn’t let on, but she doesn’t push him away.

\--------

 

Maybe six months later, his tongue slips. He’s come over to Olivia’s under the very real premise of casework, but it hadn’t taken nearly as long as expected. He’s talked into an episode of _Adventure Time_ (and when did children's shows become so damn insightful?), with a bright, open smile from Noah and a permissive nod from Olivia, so he tucks his briefcase next to the door and settles on the couch next to Noah. 

Noah truly is the keeper of the keys in this situation, but the “stay a minute,” from Olivia is new. It might just be that she can see how Noah has taken a shine to him. It might be that she sees the wear in his face; in his outcropping of grey hair. Whatever it is, he hardly needed an excuse. 

Now, the third episode is ending, and Noah is curled against his legs at the foot of the couch, falling asleep. Rafael is so warm and heavy that most of his thoughts of leaving have trailed off into incomprehensible, waking dream garbles. 

"I should get him to bed," Olivia sighs from her place on the ottoman, and really, she could be talking about either one of them. She pushes herself up reluctantly, walking over to the couch and brushing Noah's hair from his face as Rafael watches, doing his best to rouse himself. 

Noah mumbles something incoherent about "bacon pancakes,” but makes no other sign of consciousness. Rafael laughs, and then Olivia is resting her weight against the couch, cupping Rafael's cheek instead. 

“You were almost out,” she teases. Her timbre is honeysuckle and amber, alluring and sweet and centering. There's such a warmth in her eyes and her palm that Rafael is starstruck.

"Are you even aware of your effect on people?" He asks, low and breathless. The enfolded question, _are you aware of your effect on me_ , remains tacit by nothing short of a miracle. 

Olivia pauses, her mouth forming a small, quiet “oh,” in startled answer. Rafael tries to follow it with something further, something to reign himself in, steer them to more appropriate ground, to suggest he should be going, perhaps. 

But Olivia doesn’t drop her hand, so Rafael is beholden. 

“What does that mean?” She asks, deliberately steady, but as he swallows dryly, her fingers twitch against Rafael’s cheek. Her gaze falls from his eyes to his throat, and the slightest crackle races from her fingers to Rafael’s skin, heat blooming over his lips, and across his chest. 

“Your voice, Liv.” It falls out of him, compelled, and he turns his face so that his lips brush against her wrist. He knows, buried memories floating up, unbidden, that he’ll feel the sharp flare of heat against his mouth for hours after he’s gone. 

He knows she must feel it, too, because she drops her hand, staring at it as if it’s betrayed her. As Rafael snaps into awareness, Noah grumbles audibly.

Olivia slowly, mechanically slips away from Rafael and off the couch, hoisting Noah. She makes it halfway to the hallway, Noah in her arms, before she turns back to Rafael with a wrinkle between her brows. 

“I need to…” she can’t seem to finish the sentence, but Rafael nods.

“I’ll see you Monday,” he says, clearing his throat at his tepid delivery. She nods, looking for all the world like she wants to reply, but Noah squirms against her shoulder, and her confusion smoothes away to allow the task at hand. 

\--------------

Rafael carries the warmth with him into the night. By the time he arrives at his own apartment, no real memory of the journey, a tangle of pinpricks bothers the nape of his neck. He strips, practically throwing his jacket and shirt across the bedroom in an absurd effort to rid himself of it, but it only grows more persistent. A shower seems to subdue it just to the point of falling into a fraught sleep, but it’s only a brief reprieve.

Sometime between three and four, it wakes him fully, buzzing down his spine and across his shoulders. It’s familiar, and not at all unpleasant. Rafael sighs, sinking into his mattress as his body recalls another bed, another warm, hard body, eons ago. Hands at his throat that mirrored his own. A tongue licking into his mouth, breaking him open and reciting sacred words that no one else had ever dared to acknowledge. 

But the voice he imagines at his ear, coaxing his hand down his torso, is grounded in the present. As his fingers splay against his thigh, he feels drugged and hyper-aware and frantic and like he’s moving through molasses all at once, but above all he feels _good_. He’s luxuriating in _good_. 

_Do you want this?_

“Yes,” he answers aloud, his voice absorbed into the heat pervading the air. “Please.”

 _Good._

After that, it’s a jumble of breath and whispers and requests and commands and finally, mercifully, release. 

Catching his breath takes a full minute. He rasps against the total silence of the room, slowing second by second until he can think again. When he has regained some semblance of control, he stares at the ceiling in disbelief, in relieved and gnawing confirmation.

Before he drifts off, a conclusion emblazons itself behind his eyelids. 

_Olivia needs to know. Maybe not about_ this _, specifically. Maybe about this, in less detail. But she needs to know._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a buried chapter of Olivia's past resurfaces, and Rafael opens up.

Olivia wakes to stinging palms. Her lips feel bruised, bitten, and fairly swollen. Her throat is campfire-sore, but she doesn’t feel it like she usually anticipates an oncoming cold. Her body may not be fighting infection, but something is certainly askew. 

_Rafa_. 

Her dreams tumble back to her in bits and pieces, disappearing as quickly as she can strain one segment from her not-yet-lucid waking. Flashes of hands (hers), and lips (hers) gliding over collarbones (his) and leaving bites on thighs (definitely his) appear brightly behind her eyelids.

_But we didn’t --_

A reverberant shock courses through her, pulling sideways across her hips, and she automatically lets it direct her body, shifting from her side onto her back.

_Did we?_

The ceiling stares back at her resolutely as she rubs her palms on the comforter. No, Olivia has no doubt -- they ended the night when Noah fell asleep. Rafael was gone before she managed to put Noah into his pajamas, and even though she knew it would be, her heart did sink when she returned to find the living room emptied. There was no kissing, no grasping, nor what feels suspiciously like manhandling. 

Even in the privacy of her bed, Olivia blushes at the rearing of her subconscious. She’s no stranger to sex dreams of every stripe, and she’s past blaming herself for the nightmares out of which she’s thankful to be jolted, or, occasionally, the scenarios so nonsensical but persuasive that she has trouble separating dream from memory. Far more rarely, those blessings to a touch-starved body, in which vestiges of sensation, imagined though they may be, leave her sinking under the sheets upon waking, praying she can fall back asleep. 

Admittedly, Rafael has played starring roles in these last, inarguably more pleasant episodes. At first, she didn’t think much about it, at least no more than any of the other faces that supplant each other in no discernible order. It’s completely normal to have physical dreams about one’s handsome-in-a-fussy-way coworker. 

It’s less innocuous to have reoccuring, increasingly intimate dreams about one’s coworker who has transformed into something far more than a colleague, but Rafael is certainly not on the top of Olivia’s list of ongoing investigations. 

At least, he hadn’t been. 

Last night’s touch -- the sleepy tilt of his head, the sincerity and soft wonder in his eyes, the pronounced desire riding low and rough in his question -- changes things. The resulting dream, which is so slow to leave her in the soft, pale light filtering through the bedroom blinds, changes things. 

Olivia has only ever had one other dream with this waking potency, and she’s not keen to remember it, but her brain and body work together, making the natural comparisons. Despite years, and bodies, and traumas buried, a prickle of sweat breaks across her sternum when she recalls blonde hair tickling her cheek. Long, thin fingers pressing against her chest, and narrow shoulders usually so steadfast turned tender and tremulous under her hands. A warm, soft palm cupping her face, thumbing her lips and coaxing them into a familiar name. 

That morning, too, she had woken up with a raw throat, and kiss-bruised lips. She was buzzing, bewildered, and aching with loss in more ways than one, remembering the almost-kiss of the previous evening. She hadn’t been able to touch, or even look at Alex for too long, for at least a month after. 

Olivia snorts. _What is it with me and ADA’s?_

Even as she starts to gain control over her consciousness, Olivia’s hand slides over her ribs and hipbones. Alex’s imagined kisses faded from her body’s memory a long time ago, but now they seem to rush back to the surface to mingle with Rafael’s. They rise to meet her hands, as if drawn by the lightest touch of her fingers, and as she leads them to the juncture of her thighs, Olivia knows she might be on the verge of something completely unadvisable. But _such_ fun. 

A jangle from her bedside table drags her back from any prospect of fun, and she has to clear her throat twice before she trusts herself to answer the phone. The flush drains from her body as soon as she hears the APB, and with it all thoughts of anyone’s mouth on her skin.

\-----------------------

Olivia’s Saturday is unrelenting. When she finally unlocks the apartment door a few ticks past one in the morning, she’s too weary to do much more than thank (and tip) Lucy profusely, surreptitiously kiss Noah on the forehead, and fall into a dreamless slumber. 

Sunday is sunny and crisp, and encourages a more grateful, exuberant state, so she takes Noah to the Lincoln Center library for the story hour she enjoys more than she would admit to anyone other than Melinda or Amanda.

She only thinks about Rafael once, after she grabs Noah away from the lip of the active fountain -- the jets glinting and dancing temptingly to any young child. She deposits Noah on the bench, watching ruefully as a few pennies escape his hand and plop into the fountain without the benefit of a fully-formed wish. 

Something about their descent strikes her, and for a moment she’s caught in their shimmer under the lapping, manufactured waves. It’s the same shine that she saw in Rafael’s eyes when he leaned in; left a kiss against her wrist that she can feel even now. But he’s not the only one whose gaze has turned mutable; malleable when her hand cups his cheek. 

_This is not the first time._

A roar of an ocean thousands of miles away sounds in her ears, and she finds herself holding back tears before Noah wipes them away with a shout toward the hot dog cart. 

\--------------------

Monday and Tuesday comes and goes without the professional need for Rafael. By Wednesday, she knows she’ll see him. Not only that it’s inevitable, but there’s a consistent distraction in her gut that’s laid dormant since she’s refused to call or text. The other shoe is about to drop. Well, more accurately, she has to drop the damn shoe herself. 

Sure enough, the opportunity arises mid-afternoon, and instead of letting Carisi or Rollins deliver files, she casually takes it upon herself to make the solo journey. Somewhat obstinately, she’s not preparing to make any overtures. She hasn’t had the time to construct a monologue, so when she steps through the door to his office, her heart jumps into her throat.

He’s the same as he’s always been -- sleeves rolled to his elbows, nose deep in a tome-length brief, one hand working furiously in scribbles and pecks across a yellow legal pad. 

_This is the same Rafael,_ she reminds herself. _The world has not fallen to pieces. Neither have you._

He looks up. Not startled, just interrupting his own thought process, and she sees him stifle a quick exhalation. Breath leaves her at the same time, and for a moment she can only look at him. 

He’s the first to break the silence. 

“Hi.”

It’s quiet, accompanied by a slight smile, but even then she can’t relax. She shifts back on her heels before approaching the desk. 

“The Brewster case,” she returns, plunking down the manila envelope that, in reality, doesn’t hold anything particularly sensitive. “Seems like you should be able to close this one, no problem.”

He nods, waiting.

“Thank you for taking the time,” he says, when she can’t push anything else out. Olivia nods, and a tidal wave of discomfort nearly knocks her over as she stares at the file. She’s marshaling her nerve, willing something to trip off her tongue, when he speaks again.

“There’s a line,” he starts. “In the sand, if you will. A strange, disappearing line between the sea and the shore.”

He’s halting and careful in a way that Olivia has only ever heard in the rarest, murkiest of cases. Occasionally, it brings her some small pleasure to know he has to re-sort through his biases and predilections, but not today. At least it’s not that spitting, unblinking manner in which he’d found out about her and Tucker last year, but the same turbulence lies just beneath the surface of his deliberation.

“I crossed the line, Olivia. And I think you did, too.”

She blinks, attempting to combat the twisting of her stomach.

“What do you mean?”

He shuffles a few papers aside, tapping his pen against the polished desktop. 

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, but I need to ask you a few questions.”

This careful, neutral tone is beginning to frighten Olivia.

“Rafael, if this is about Friday, I don’t think that either of us did anything wrong,” she says, with a forced laugh so small it’s barely a sound. His pen starts tapping more rapidly in response, before he catches himself. 

“Nothing wrong, no,” he says, and it’s kinder. He motions for her to sit, which Olivia does with some trepidation. “Just -- can I ask you a few questions?”

Holding his gaze convinces her -- there’s no ill intent or deception, but there is something he’s building toward, however vaguely and clumsily. Something for which she needs to give permission. When she settles back in the chair, regarding him with a curt nod, he smiles again. 

Quiet. Kind. Nervous, like she’s never seen. 

“Did something happen? Friday night,” he starts. This she’s already answered for herself, but it’s curious that he’s asking, too. 

“You mean between us? You don’t remember.”

“No, after I left,” he says, hedging.

“No. Noah was out, so I went to bed,” she responds, and he nods, still holding her sight. 

“And nothing the next morning?”

Olivia eyes him, his frame tense enough to bely his careful, gently probing tone. She’s about to answer in the negative when he spits it out.

“Or when you dreamt. Did something happen?”

His eyes are too much for just a moment, as it rushes back to her unbidden. Even as he stares at her from across the desk, unmoving, she feels her thumb against his lips, her fingertips digging into the dips and planes of his torso. 

“Yes,” she says hoarsely, as if a whisper will counterbalance the content of the utterance. But it’s out of her mouth, and he leans back against the chair as if pushed. If she thought the atmosphere was tense before, now it’s thrumming with precarity. She’s not sure if she’ll ever be able to stand back up from the chair for fear of falling. 

“You don’t have to say anything else,” Rafael says. 

“I want to, but I’m not sure how to start,” she returns, faint to her own ears. “This line you’re talking about --”

“It’s not a real line. Not anything that could be filed under inappropriate conduct -- I don’t know where HR would start.”

The weary humor in his voice revives her, and the room comes back into focus. 

“No, I don’t think so.”

The question hovers, unasked -- what does he know? How does he know?

Alex had never said a thing, even when Olivia was sure that the heat rising from her cheeks should have alerted the other woman. Olivia had worked so actively to absorb her shame’s colors, repressing it for long enough that somehow, one day, it simply passed through her body -- in one side, out the other. It hadn’t reignited again.

But looking at Rafael, at his sagging recline, the bloom of heat is back. 

“The line is somewhere between empiricism and mysticism.”

“Come again?”

That smile is still playing across his lips as he drops his pen, and rubs his palms along his face, grinding in the worry lines. He drops his hands to catch her eyes again. 

“We’re both empiricists. We look for evidence over conjecture. But you -- you look for evidence in stories that no one else believes.”

“So you’ve told me,” Olivia reminds him.

“Would you believe yourself? Your own senses? Even if they’re telling you something that no one else believes?”

“You’re speaking in riddles, Rafa. You want me to start calling you Mulder?”

Rafael scoffs at the comparison.

“I don’t mean to.”

“I know.”

There’s a comfortable standstill for a moment. It’s Olivia’s turn to sigh -- to offer something of herself.

“You were in my dream.”

“I know. You were in mine,” he parrots. 

“How?”

Rafael shrugs, but he leans forward, his mouth set in a determined line. 

“Mi abuelita used to tell me stories, when I was young enough to hang on to her every word. Young enough to take secrecy with a deadly seriousness, too. She told me stories about women with words pulled directly from the mouths of saints and devils. She alternated for variety’s sake, I think. Brujas who spoke in smoke, who saw through the eyes of hawks.

“I forgot them, mostly. Thought I did. Realized they were just ramblings, and I was better off forgetting my own investment, and how much they had shaped me. But I...I met someone who changed my mind. Gave me evidence that the folk tales had merit, in some sense. There were kernels of truth -- real, and hard enough to bite down on. But eventually I forgot him, too.”

Rafael’s eyes are downcast, and his words turn bitten and harsh by the time he stops for a breath. He takes it deeply, slowly, before he asks. 

“Olivia. Do you know what you can do? Your voice.”

“I don’t know,” she swallows, feeling like she owes him honesty despite his earlier allowances. “My mother told me some of those stories. Not the same ones, I’m sure, but those old country fables. Usually when she was so soused she could have been reciting the alphabet for all I cared.”

Rafael is so soft when he reaches across the desk to her hand. She lets him take it, his thumb brushing her knuckles with a drag that makes her bite the inside of her cheek.

“But they were just stories,” he says ruefully. 

“Oh, yeah. Just stories.”

“So you don’t know.”

“I know that I’m good at my job,” Olivia says, watching the way his thumb sweeps over the hills and valleys of her hand. “I know...I know that too often I let it consume me. And I know that there’s always going to be a reason for that. And I know that you were in my dream, and I was in yours, and that you seem to have a history of trouble.”

Rafael nods, then in a gesture that seems nearly automatic, he brings her hand to his face, mirroring the interrupted evening. She doesn’t find herself in any place to recoil. His cheek is warm, slightly rough, and she can tell that he wants so badly to put his mouth to her wrist again. Her abdomen tenses when she realizes she wouldn’t stop him. 

“Can you try something for me?”

“What?” She matches his hushed tone.

“Ask me for something. Anything.” 

“Oh.”

“Within reason,” he amends. It barely takes her a second to find a request. She slides into a pitch that’s familiar, but the caged longing in his gaze pushes her into that pocket just between comfort and consumption. 

“Come home with me tonight,” she says, the world tilting on its axis as she sees the words sinking into him, imprinting into his consciousness. His eyes are shimmering, and he’s nodding without any sense that his head is moving. Rafael is totally pliant under her voice, leaning into her hand with a submission that’s thrilling and absolutely terrifying. 

As she brings her hand away, he shakes himself, wetting his lips unconsciously.

“I would have agreed to that in any case,” he says, and she’d laugh at how put-out he sounds if her heart weren’t audibly pounding against her chest, rushing and skipping in her ears.

“We’ll talk?” She asks, pressing her hands against her quads. 

“Oh, we’ll talk. And then you’ll talk, and I’ll listen,” he says lowly. 

“I --” her words falter. “All right.” She stands, shouting a silent thanks when her legs stay steady beneath her. She’s to the door by the time he speaks.

“Liv.”

“Mmhm?”

“We can just talk.” 

A frisson runs from between her shoulder blades to her cocyx, sharp and searing and sinful.

“Little too late for that, Rafa.”

She swears she can hear Alex laughing as she closes the door on his slack-jawed expression.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back! AND SO IS ALEX CABOT! Well, kind of. Thanks for continuing on this strangely feasible magical realism ride with me! Appreciate any thoughts you might have. 
> 
> Next chapter will probably be the last - can't resist a little bit of experimentation with the chemistry these two have! And by experimentation I 100% mean sex magic.

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy. This is a thought experiment concerning Olivia's ability to push just a little harder than what is within expected limitation. Just touching at the bounds of SVU reality! 
> 
> If you're interested, the proper term for the "current" Rafael notices is aché, and it's foundational across a lot of aspects of santería, especially within the Lucumí religion, which originated in Cuba. I'm mostly drawing on that and brujería to shade in this universe. 
> 
> Would love to know what you think!
> 
> P.S. big thank you to rosehips for the copyedit and encouragement xo


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